Tout Sweet by Summersdale Publishers

In her mid-thirties, fashion editor Karen has it all: a handsome boyfriend, a fab flat in west London and an array of gorgeous shoes. But when Eric leaves, she hangs up her Manolos and waves goodbye to her glamorous city lifestyle to go it alone in a run-down house in rural Poitou-Charentes, central western France.

Perfect summer reading for anyone who dreams of chucking away their BlackBerry in favour of real blackberrying and downshifting to France. Karen Wheeler is a former fashion editor for the Mail on Sunday and currently writes for the Financial Times How to Spend It magazine and the Daily Mail. Her work has appeared in ES and You magazines, Sunday Times Style and numerous international publications.

£7.99 TRAVEL WRITING Cover Image © Andrew Davies

Hanging up my High Heels for a New Life in France

Acquiring a host of new friends and unsuitable suitors, she learns that true happiness can be found in the simplest of things – a bike ride through the countryside on a summer evening, or a kir or three in a neighbour’s courtyard.

Tout Sweet

‘an hilarious account of a fashion guru who swaps Prada for paintbrushes and Pineau in rural France’ MAIL ON SUNDAY Travel

Tout Sweet

Hanging up my High Heels for a New Life in France

Tout Sweet

Hanging up my High Heels for a New Life in France

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TOUT SWEET Copyright ÂŠ Karen Wheeler 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means, nor transmitted, nor translated into a machine language, without the written permission of the publishers. The right of Karen Wheeler to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Condition of Sale This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher. Summersdale Publishers Ltd 46 West Street Chichester West Sussex PO19 1RP UK www.summersdale.com Printed and bound in Great Britain ISBN: 978-1-84024-761-9 Substantial discounts on bulk quantities of Summersdale books are available to corporations, professional associations and other organisations. For details telephone Summersdale Publishers on (+44-1243-771107), fax (+44-1243786300) or email (nicky@summersdale.com).

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Contents Which Way to Portsmouth?...................................................5 The House That Found Me.................................................23 Miranda..............................................................................39 Full Moon...........................................................................61 Let My New Life Begin… ...................................................83 Camping Out....................................................................102 Moving In.........................................................................122 Lonely in La Rochelle........................................................139 Patisserie and Poetry...........................................................146 Word Games.....................................................................164 Miranda’s Birthday.............................................................177 Pink Cocktails in Paris.......................................................194 Progress.............................................................................205 The Antiques Dealer of Angouleme...................................218 The Long, Graceful Goodbye.............................................235 Summer.............................................................................259 Pie Night...........................................................................271 A Minx in Anzac...............................................................283 Christmas Day...................................................................309 New Year’s Eve..................................................................325 Gone.................................................................................338 The Bridge to the Île de Ré................................................347

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Note From the Author There are several villages called Villiers in France, but my village in the Poitou-Charentes is not one of them. I have changed names and details throughout the book in order to protect the innocent (and the not so innocent) and have occasionally embellished facts for the same reason.

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Chapter 1

Which Way to Portsmouth? OH DEAR GOD, what have I done? Somewhere on the lumbering ferry between Portsmouth and Caen, my feet are not so much turning cold as sprouting icicles in their jade-encrusted Miu Miu flip-flops. Three hours ago I closed the door on my west London life, leaving behind a broadband connection, bathtub, a fully functioning kitchen (complete with floor) and a building full of attractive neighbours who I counted as friends. I am now a few hours away from ‘a new life’ in France. Earlier, sitting in the on-board cafe surrounded by so-called ‘emi-greys’, it occurred to me that I might be moving three decades too early. After all, most people go to France to retire. But my friends have been telling me for months how envious they are and how lucky I am. They seemed so genuinely thrilled when I told them I was moving abroad that I started to feel a little paranoid. ‘It’s going to be wonderful – you won’t want to come back,’ they said. So no pressure then.

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But what if it’s not wonderful? What if I hate it and want to come back immediately? A year ago, I was planning my wedding. Now I am planning to live alone in a remote village, where I will be half an hour’s drive from the nearest decent supermarket, several hours by train from the nearest Prada store and a five-hour journey (and Channel-crossing) from the nearest M&S food hall. My new home has no indoor loo, no bathtub, no kitchen sink and no hot water. It has flowery brown wallpaper in almost every room, damp climbing up the crumbly walls and a gaping hole looking down into a dank cellar instead of a kitchen floor. Then there’s the pile of rubbish the size of the Pyrenees in the rear courtyard. I don’t even have the clothes for this kind of life. After a decade and a half of working in fashion, most of my wardrobe is designed for going to cocktail parties – or, at the very least, breakfast at Claridges – and my shoes are so high that I need a Sherpa and an oxygen tank to wear them. Downstairs, on deck 3B, my ancient Golf is laden with the remnants of eighteen years in London. My furniture and twentyfour huge brown boxes of possessions were dispatched to the Poitou-Charentes in an enormous lorry earlier in the week. This morning – with the help of my neighbour Jerome – I packed up what remained after the removal lorry had gone. Unfortunately, what remained could easily have filled another van. Between 9.00 a.m. and noon, we stuffed my remaining clothes and possessions into bin bags and plastic carriers and ferried them down four flights of stairs. ‘Darling, this really is very last-minute,’ said Jerome, lips pursed disapprovingly. ‘Even by your standards. Most people would at least have dismantled the bookshelves and packed everything in boxes weeks ago.’ ‘But I did,’ I protested. ‘And this is what was left over.’ 6

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The last three hours of my London life seemed to slip by in minutes. Finally, I ran the vacuum cleaner around the bedroom, left a bottle of champagne and some chocolates in the fridge for the new occupants and locked the door for the last time. Downstairs, I surveyed the colourful pile of miscellanea on the pavement with dismay. In addition to the bin bags stuffed with clothes, there were work files, my laptop, table lamps, rugs, plants, dusters, random coat hangers, a pair of zebra-print stilettos stuffed inside a wastepaper bin and a big black hat trimmed with roses that I kept specifically for weddings. The car boot was already filled with duvets, pillows and fifteen bags of dried fruit, the rear seats with bin bags, boxes of china and my stockpile of Farrow & Ball paint, along with the handbags and shoes that I put into storage… and then rescued again. It can’t all be mud and waxed green jackets, I told myself. ‘You’ll have to get in the car,’ said Jerome, a window dresser by profession. ‘And I’ll somehow stuff the rest of it around you.’ When he had finished cramming in shoes, clothes and magazines at random, I couldn’t see out of the rear window and my nose was almost touching the windscreen thanks to the giant potted palm wedged behind the driver’s seat. ‘Good luck,’ said Jerome as I pulled away. ‘Don’t forget to email me when you arrive.’ ‘Bon voyage!’ yelled Daisy, my neighbour. ‘Hopefully see you in France next summer.’ As the car limped to the end of the road, its suspension several inches closer to the ground than usual, I realised I had forgotten something. Panicking, I reversed at speed, the sound of china rattling ominously as we hit the traffic bumps. Fortunately, Daisy and Jerome were still standing by the gate. ‘How do I get to Portsmouth?’ I yelled. 7

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‘The A3,’ Daisy shouted back. ‘Follow the signs from Hammersmith.’ ‘I give it a month,’ said Jerome, shaking his head, ‘before you’re back.’ So my exit was not an orderly one. But as I drove through the familiar streets of west London – sunny but empty on an August Bank Holiday Monday – it felt liberating to leave behind the playground of over a decade, which, in truth, had started to feel like a prison over the past year. Even my flat had become a place of sad memories, filled like the streets of my neighbourhood with the ghosts of my last relationship. I couldn’t walk past certain restaurants in Notting Hill, sit in the French cafe behind Kensington High Street or stroll through Holland Park without feeling sad at the thought of what I had lost. But as I whipped past Olympia that August morning and flew around the Hammersmith roundabout – both normally choked with traffic – it seemed that London was releasing me without a fight. In addition to the flat, I also gave up a career that many would kill for, as fashion and beauty director of a glossy magazine. Although I had loved working in fashion in my twenties and early thirties, I had reached the stage where I could no longer deal with fashion designers and their ridiculous egos. It had taken me fifteen years to come to the conclusion that I couldn’t bear fashion people. I was tired of conspiring in key fashion myths: that it’s necessary to spend £600-plus on a new designer handbag every six months, or that a grown-up woman could look good in a ra-ra skirt, micro-shorts or whatever unseemly trend designers were pushing that season. I also felt guilty about persuading readers to rush out and buy ‘must-have’ items that 8

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I knew were ‘must-nots’ and that would end up on a fast track to landfill within six months. In truth, I had been persuaded to take the magazine job by a friend, the then features editor. After the cut and thrust of a newspaper, I figured it would be a cushy number. And it was: decisions that took me five minutes to make on a newspaper were discussed and mulled over for days by at least half a dozen people. We spent hours sitting around in the editor’s office drinking coffee and eating cake. The only problem (and it was a big one) was that I ended up having to work with an unedifying procession of photographers chosen by the bookings editor, many of whom were his personal friends or the baggage of his love life. And so I travelled to Miami with a photographer who had an ego the size of Africa, to New York with a borderline psychopath and to Australia with a photographer who had never done a professional fashion shoot before, where I stood for hours on an unsheltered beach, slowly being barbecued while he fiddled around with his exposure. I could have painted a watercolour of the scene in the time it took him to focus his lens. And invariably, they would do the exact opposite of the brief. Floral and pretty? The photographer would instruct the make-up artist to kohl up the eyes and do something ‘edgy’ with the hair, ‘edgy’ being the photographer’s favourite word – no matter that they had been hired to work for a magazine that was very unedgy, commercial and safe. If I had a euro for every photographer who thought he was pushing the envelope by making a model look ugly, I would be moving to a villa in St Tropez now rather than a small cottage in the Poitou-Charentes. The final straw, or as the French would say, ‘the drop of water that caused the vase to overflow’, however, came in the form 9

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of Larry Malibu, a fashion photographer who nearly every magazine editor in London refused to work with because of his unpredictable behaviour and inability to stick to a brief. One of my editors, however, had once enjoyed a passionate fling with him, and so it was that I found myself en route to California with him to shoot summer covers. This might sound wonderful in theory – being paid to spend a week in California – but let me tell you: it so wasn’t. On the flight over, Larry Malibu became drunk and abusive, insulted the gay hairdresser and reduced the make-up artist to tears; on the first day, he told us all to ‘fuck off’, since he needed to be left alone to ‘bond’ with the model and ‘create some chemistry’. He then disappeared into the sand dunes with her for several hours. The resultant shots – which showed a model lying supine in the sand, emerging topless from the sea, and ecstatically clutching her breasts while straddling a sand dune – were more suitable for Loaded than a fashion and beauty magazine, and totally unusable. On the second day, he refused point blank to shoot the visuals for a ‘Get That Summer Glow’ feature, saying that the shots were ‘effing boring’, and on days three and four, he refused to shoot anything at all. On day five, he threatened to kill the makeup artist, who then asked to be flown home. I didn’t bother arguing. I just came back to London and resigned. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we are now approaching Caen…’ It is time to ditch the cabin where I have been holed up with a mound of magazines for the past six hours. As I am closing the door in the narrow corridor, I overhear a couple in their mid-thirties emerging from a nearby cabin. ‘DON’T. EVEN. TALK. TO. ME,’ the guy is saying, the palm of his hand raised towards her as if to keep her out of his face – and they are not 10

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even in the car yet. It seems like a sign of encouragement. Better to travel alone, I tell myself, than with an angry companion. I make my way to the outside deck and, with a sea breeze whipping my hair across my face, watch Caen draw closer in the fading summer light. The lights of the port twinkle like Harry Winston diamonds in the semi-darkness, but all I can think about is the five-hour drive through the night to Poitiers that awaits me on landing. Suddenly exhausted from all the packing and dismantling of the previous two weeks, I make a snap decision: I will spend the night in one of the little hotels around the ferry port and set out early tomorrow morning. That way I can start the first day of my new life in sunshine rather than darkness. And there is a more pressing reason: while waiting to disembark, I notice the petrol tank is almost empty. And since the self-service petrol station near the port does not take credit cards – as I discovered to my detriment on a previous visit – I wouldn’t get much further than passport control this evening, even if I wanted to. An hour or so later I am standing in the dingy reception of La Baleine, which, like most of the bars and brasseries in the centre of the town, has a few modest hotel rooms attached. The restaurant stopped serving moules frites, the standard dish around the port, an hour ago and the bar is deserted. I seem to be the only person checking in. Most of the passengers on my ferry – if not stoically pushing down to the south during the night – will at least get as far as Caen to stay in the Novotel there. The receptionist is in a hurry to leave for the evening and does not ask for a credit card, passport or any of the usual checking-in details. ‘Second floor,’ she says, without looking up. She hands me a key and points to a narrow wooden staircase. 11

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A surprise awaits me on the second-floor landing, where a man is slumped on the steps. At first I think he must be drunk, but he looks me in the eye and nods, as if it were quite normal to be lying on a hotel staircase late in the evening. He is dressed in black jeans and a bomber jacket, and has a small rucksack. I assume that he has missed the ferry and has somehow sneaked up the stairs of the La Baleine to spend the night somewhere warm. ‘Good luck to him,’ I think, though it seems a little strange – not to mention audacious – to camp out on a hotel staircase rather than in the ferry terminal. I open the door to a small room with nicotine-yellow walls and an ointment-pink bathroom suite. Claridges it isn’t. There is no hot water in the bathroom and, despite the fact that it is late August, the room is very cold. After fiddling around with the radiators for a while and failing to get a reaction, I call down to reception. There is no reply. Freezing, I climb fully clothed under the blue and yellow flowery bedcover. After a few minutes of shivering under the thin cover and single sheet, I get out of bed and search the white melamine wardrobe for blankets, but there aren’t any. I think longingly of the duvet in my car, but to get to it would involve burrowing through a mountain of possessions in the dark. There must be somebody from the hotel around, I think. I creep out of the room and along the narrow landing, noticing that the man on the staircase has fallen asleep, using his rucksack as a pillow. Downstairs, the reception is in darkness and the doors are locked. There is no night porter and no one from the hotel is on the premises. It occurs to me that I could be alone in the building with the man in black on the stairs. I rush back up the semi-lit staircase and creep along the landing, not wanting to wake him. But he stirs as I pass him. Heart pumping faster 12

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than the engine of a TGV, I unlock the door to my room – halfexpecting him to appear behind me and force his way in – spring inside and turn the key as quickly as I can. The thought of the spare keys hung up on the board behind reception flashes into my mind just as I realise that there is no way of bolting my room from the inside. This is not an auspicious start to My New Life in France. Finding myself alone in a deserted hotel in Caen with a stranger on the other side of the door was never part of the script. I think of what I have given up: the cosy flat where I could go to bed without fear of being murdered and where I lived a life cosseted by every material comfort, from 400-thread-count cotton sheets to a limestone bathroom with a state-of-the-art power shower. I didn’t need to do this. I could have carried on living my easy life for decades. I sit on the bed wondering who I can call, but the answer, I realise, is no one – at least not without great loss of face. Having been waved off to France by enthusiastic friends, this would represent a huge failure, a fall at the first fence, to call in a panic from a hotel room on my first night. I can’t even phone my mother, as I haven’t told her I’m going to live abroad and she will probably say something typically Northern and unsympathetic such as ‘Serves you right. What do you want to go moving to France for anyway?’ As I look around the cold, desolate room, it seems like a metaphor for what my life has become. Now, stuck in this hotel room, and with a sudden sound of movement in the corridor, even a week in California with Larry Malibu seems preferable. The man on the staircase, I realise to my horror, is pacing up and down outside my door. What am I going to do? No one knows I am here. I don’t even know the French equivalent of 999. I rush to the window and can 13

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see some kind of small courtyard garden two storeys below. But the window is very high and it is locked. I can hear the stranger directly outside my door – which looks like it would cave in at the slightest shove – and I brace myself for a knock or a sudden crash as he tries to force it. In a panic, I place my bag – which is the size of a small cupboard and stuffed with magazines – directly behind the door. At least this will trip him up if he breaks in, giving me a few extra seconds to run for it. Who knew that last season’s ‘must-have’ bag could transform so neatly into a weapon of self-defence? I sit down next to the phone and spot the number for the gendarmes, or police: 17, which I gratefully dial. A gruff male voice answers: ‘Oui?’ ‘I am in a hotel in Caen, La Baleine, and I am scared because there is a strange man outside my room.’ ‘Outside your room?’ ‘Yes, he is walking up and down in the corridor.’ ‘Is your room locked?’ ‘Yes. But he could break in.’ ‘Has he tried to break in?’ ‘No. But he is walking up and down all the time. It is very strange.’ ‘Madame, if your room is locked, there is no problem.’ ‘But please could you come to the hotel and find out what this man is doing here?’ The voice of emergency services wishes me a good evening and hangs up – just as I hear a sudden bang outside in the corridor. Someone is knocking loudly on a door – not my door, but nonetheless it is terrifying. Then I hear the footsteps heading towards my room once more, and then away again. What is this man doing? He is clearly psychologically unbalanced. I 14

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phone 17 again. ‘It’s me again. At La Baleine hotel. I already phoned.’ ‘Yes, Madame,’ says a weary voice. ‘The man is now standing outside my room and he is making a strange noise in the corridor.’ The voice on the other end of the phone asks again if my door is locked and when I reply in the affirmative, repeats that there is no problem. He remains unmoved by my pleas to dispatch a gendarme to investigate. Instead, he wishes me goodnight and hangs up. Outside in the corridor, Staircase Man continues, terrifyingly, to pace up and down outside my room. I phone the gendarmes four more times over the next couple of hours but fail to convince them that I am in mortal danger. And still, the pacing in the corridor continues. At one point I can even hear him talking to himself – in a low, gruff voice. I sit bolt upright in my bed, terrified. The first night of My New Life in France is turning into a scene from a Hitchcock movie. Not since the night I spent on a fashion shoot in a Kenyan safari park with food poisoning and a large, heavy-footed beast snorting and pacing around outside my tent have I been so desperate for morning to come. This wasn’t what I had in mind for my first night in France. I was planning to expand my horizons, seek happiness and harmony in nature, and find a new sense of ‘belongingness’. (In London, the place where I had come to feel I most belonged was the shoe department of Selfridges.) And, if all that failed, I told myself, I could always seek happiness in an excellent supply of red wine. To be honest, my life in London had started to seem very empty. I had wardrobes crammed with ‘It’ bags and ‘must-have’ shoes, most of them gifts from designers to thank me for articles I’d written, and I had cupboards full of free beauty products. I 15

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had spent most of my life so far focused on work and chasing material possessions. Now I had them in abundance and yet, at thirty-five, I was unhappy. There had to be more to life, I decided, than a stockpile of sought-after accessories. And if I am being truthful, there was another reason for moving to France. Finding myself unexpectedly single again at thirty-five, I could not cope with the competition. In the four years I had been living in blissful complacency with my French boyfriend, Eric, the competition had been in training. They had put in the hours at the gym and with the Botox specialist, the hair colourist and the cosmetic dentist. They had also developed some very aggressive tactics. Wherever I went out in London – whether to a friend’s dinner party or the local wine bar – I noticed with alarm a new breed of very predatory female, taking an alarmingly proactive approach to the hunt for a man. In her twenties or early thirties, she had permanently radiant skin (despite a copious intake of alcohol) and a very flat abdomen. All the designer shoes in the world, I realised, could not compete against a determined twentysomething with a low BMI, Agent Provocateur underwear and an ability to down ten units of Sauvignon Blanc without blinking. Better to make a graceful exit, I told myself, to slink off to rural France where, as a single Englishwoman, I would at least have novelty value. But France, it seemed, was not exactly waiting with welcoming arms. I have always had an ambivalent attitude to the land of the long lunch and epic dinner. My first visit was a school trip and, unimpressed by the bread and cheese we were given for breakfast and the pigeon that targeted my elevenyear-old head from high above Galeries Lafayette, I couldn’t wait to get back on the ferry home. Nor, I imagine, could Mr 16

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Pugh, our beleaguered French teacher. As he marshalled us around the sights of Paris, we were invariably followed by a pack of hormonal French teenagers, mesmerised by one of the sixth-formers among us who had long blonde hair. In Notre Dame, I recall, certain members of our group (from a strict Catholic school in the north of England) stuffed their pockets with rosary beads and mini prayer books lifted from the gift shop. The only bright spot in that school trip was the Palace of Versailles, where, intoxicated by all the gilt, I felt that France was offering me something mesmerising and beautiful. Later, as a student, I went back and endured several penurious and far-from-perfect weekends in Paris. Even as a fledgling fashion writer for a trade fashion magazine, things did not improve. Dispatched by my boss to a dismal two-star hotel on Rue Bonaparte to cover the ready-to-wear shows, I was assured that the tickets from various designers would be waiting at reception. But – quelle surprise – there wasn’t a single ticket when I arrived. I spent a stressful twenty-four hours phoning and eventually doorstepping snooty French PRs, who remained impervious to my smattering of A-level French and desperate pleas. As yet another well-dressed piece of asparagus delivered a disdainful and very final ‘non, ce n’est pas possible’, I hated Paris and its inhabitants almost as much as I hate taupe trousers. Later, when I was the fashion editor of a very successful British newspaper, tickets were not a problem. They were waiting in my hotel room, alongside a swag pile of gifts, tasteful arrangements of white flowers and ‘Bienvenue à Paris’ notes from well-known designers. But my biannual secondment to the City of Light was never going to show the city off to its best advantage. Each day was comprised 17

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of a 9.00 a.m. until midnight obstacle course, trying to get to the various shows on time fuelled only by black coffee and (if really lucky) a croque-monsieur. It was hard to love Paris when locked in total darkness in a dilapidated church with a scrum of well-dressed people and no fire exits, waiting for a fashion show to start, or shivering in a disused Métro station as a hot young ‘deconstructionist’ designer unveiled his latest shredded offerings. The glossy magazine editors had chauffeur-driven cars at their disposal; newspaper journalists were forced to endure endless slow shuffles to the front of a taxi queue. Invariably, there would be a (very welcome) champagne interlude at some point in the evening, but then it was back to your hotel room to write copy until 2.00 a.m. The strange diet, punctuated by frequent coups de champagne and combined with a lack of sleep, does strange things to your blood sugar levels and mood. No wonder fashion people are so unlovable. The turning point came when I met Eric, my French boyfriend. Only then did I really learn to love France. With him, I saw Paris through different eyes. I have a particular soft spot for the Hôtel Costes, where, dressed in shabby jeans and summer flip-flops but always given a warm welcome by the staff, we would go for early evening drinks. Usually, I would be there for work (the magazine that I worked for at the time insisted on sending me to Paris to do cover shoots) and Eric would meet me there, before the two of us travelled on to his father’s place on the Île de Ré. Engulfed in the Costes’ moody, sexy, rose-scented atmosphere, we would drink aperitifs and then head to a dimly lit dinner in the Marais. I almost feel more affection for the Hôtel Costes than I do for the city itself. My future, as I had often smugly reflected, seemed assured: a 18

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sexy French husband, a second home in France and bilingual enfants dressed in Bonpoint clothing. I consider the day spent crab fishing with Eric on the Île de Ré to be possibly the happiest of my life. The summer evenings spent cycling through the island’s narrow village streets lined with hollyhocks or fields of sunflowers on our way to the little port of St Martin had a bitter-sweet resonance now. But with Eric in my life, France opened up from a tight flower bud into a big, voluptuous bloom. He had asked me many times to marry him, from the earliest days of the relationship, but then, just as I was ready to sign up to the deal and had started to plan a glamorous wedding on the Île de Ré, he returned from a trip to France, where he had been escorting rich American tourists around ‘Van Gogh’s Provence’, and told me that he was leaving. I still don’t know where he went – it could have been round the corner for all I knew – but such was his haste that he left behind his wine rack, coffee machine and the skyscraper-sized speakers of his sound system. I gave the speakers to my friend Brigid and left the other stuff on the street, so that all that remained of him was a twisted metal hanger in an empty cupboard and some very painful memories. Now here I am, holed up in a cold hotel with a scary stranger prowling around outside my door. For a moment I dabble with the idea of booking myself a passage right back to Portsmouth on the 8.00 a.m. ferry tomorrow, but there’s just the small question of where I am going to live if I do that. At least in France there is a decaying old house waiting for me. Miraculously, at some point before dawn, I fall asleep. When I wake up it is 10.00 a.m. and the door is still intact. No one has broken in and it feels like I have survived the first major 19

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test of My New Life in France. And with a huge surge of relief, I am grateful for the simple fact that it is morning and I am still alive. There is no sign of Staircase Man as I leave and I am beginning to think I might have imagined him. Downstairs, I ask the receptionist if it is possible to get a coffee and a croissant. ‘No,’ is the reply. ‘You are too late. Breakfast finished at ten o’clock.’ ‘But I got up late because I did not sleep very well.’ ‘Ah, no? How do you wish to pay?’ ‘It was very cold in the room.’ ‘Ah, no, it wasn’t cold,’ she says. ‘Yes it was. The radiators weren’t working.’ ‘Yes, they were working.’ ‘No, they were not.’ ‘Yes, but of course, they are,’ she grimaces at me as if she has just bitten into a sour citron. ‘And there was no hot water.’ ‘No hot water? But of course there was hot water,’ she insists and in my fatigued state, I want to slap her or at least drag her back upstairs to prove the point. ‘And more, there was a strange man asleep on the stairs,’ I say. She arches an overly plucked eyebrow as if I’d just told her that the sun is croissant-shaped. ‘A man asleep on the stairs? No, it’s not possible,’ she says. ‘Yes, I am telling you. There was, for sure, a strange man asleep on the stairs.’ ‘What was he wearing, this strange man?’ she asks, looking sceptical. I tell her. 20

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‘Aah,’ she says. ‘That was not a strange man. That was a gendarme.’ ‘No, I don’t think so. He wasn’t wearing the clothes of a gendarme.’ ‘Yes, he was a gendarme,’ she says, pointing behind me, ‘but he was in normal clothes. Look! There are some more gendarmes – his colleagues.’ I turn around, just in time to see five uniformed policemen climbing out of a dark van and coming our way. It starts to feel like the denouement of George Orwell’s 1984, where the Thought Police come storming in through a window. Finally, I think, the gendarmes are reacting to the emergency calls that I made last night. But now that Staircase Man has gone, they are probably going to arrest me instead for wasting their time. But the gendarmes head straight up the narrow staircase without stopping. ‘Who are they looking for?’ I ask, feeling nervous. ‘A clandestin,’ she replies. ‘A clandestin? That means what?’ She explains that it is someone who is in the country illegally. ‘So the man on the staircase was a clandestin?’ ‘No, Madame,’ she says, losing patience. ‘He was guarding the clandestin. Those are the other gendarmes who have come to make sure that the clandestin leaves. He is going to your country, I think, as he has family there.’ ‘But if he was a gendarme, why wasn’t he wearing a uniform?’ ‘Because he was performing exceptional duties and staying in a hotel; we did not want to frighten the other guests.’ Suddenly, in my fatigued state, I understand what she is telling me and my cheeks turn pink with embarrassment. 21

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Feeling like the village idiot, I pay the bill and get out of that hotel as quickly as possible, skulking shamefacedly past the three gendarmes who are guarding the van outside. The exquisite irony of it all is not lost on me: I spent the entire night worrying that I was about to be murdered and desperately looking for a policeman and there was one outside my door the whole time. There is a lesson in there somewhere. Safely inside my car, I see the funny side – well, almost. And then I head off, uncaffeinated – and with a stack of shoeboxes obscuring my rear window – to negotiate the terrifying, multiple merging lanes of the Caen périphérique.

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Chapter 2

The House That Found Me IT IS LATE afternoon when I finally arrive in the square at Villiers. The little cluster of French flags fluttering outside the mairie always causes my heart to flip, as does the sight of the boulangerie and the Café du Commerce, with its tables and chairs arranged outside in the late August sunshine. I turn into the narrow cobbled street that leads to Maison Coquelicot. As usual, with its charmless grey pebble-dash exterior and its shutters closed, it looks daunting – and this time, without the benefit of a return ticket in my bag, doubly so. I think back to the Saturday morning and the strange quirk of fate that led me to the house just over a year ago. After I split up with Eric, I lost two stone in weight. Unfortunately, I also lost my mind – or almost. Gratifying though it was to catch sight of my jeans sliding down my skinny hips thanks to a diet of coffee and dark chocolate, it was a poor substitute for the emotional devastation of finding myself

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alone at thirty-five, just as my few remaining single friends were suddenly announcing that they had met ‘someone’. It was several months before I could stop spontaneously bursting into tears in public. Night after night I woke up at almost exactly 3.20 a.m. wondering what to do with the rest of my life and the endless, lonely weekends ahead of me. At no point, in those bleak days, did the answer ‘move to France and renovate a house’ pop into my mind. But at some point I stopped crying long enough to take my future into my own hands. I enrolled on a creative writing course in Yorkshire (courses being my antidote to misery back then) and on the first night I made friends with an advertising director called Dave. He was unpacking his car and I was reversing mine into a stone wall. It broke the ice as well as my rear light. Later, over the introductory drinks on the terrace, we got talking further. Dave worked for a well-known advertising agency in London, acting as the link between clients and ‘creatives’. He didn’t like the job very much. I could tell this because he referred to the creative directors at his agency as ‘pretentious prats’ and the clients as ‘a pain in the arse’. He was looking for an exit strategy before his new boss pushed him out, and was hoping to write an exposé of the advertising industry, loosely disguised as fiction, which is why he had enrolled on the course. Then he told me about the house in France that he and his wife had just bought, and his plans to convert his barn into a writing retreat. I was a captive audience. ‘Come and stay,’ he offered before the evening was out. ‘That’s if you don’t mind roughing it with a few pilots.’ ‘Pilots?’ ‘Yes, one of my mates owns an airfield nearby, where he teaches people to fly microlights. The pilots rent rooms from me – it’s a bit like a B&B, only more relaxed.’ 24

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I didn’t even know what a microlight was, but the invitation sounded appealing. I imagined myself sitting at a wooden trestle table, sharing a bottle of wine with a posse of flirtatious men in flying jackets. Dave was a very affable character who spent most of his time socialising and taking advantage of the retreat’s generous wine supplies and ‘honesty box’ system. One evening, word had it that he had forsaken the communal meal to drive over forty miles for a curry. As for me, I spent most of my time holed up in my monastic white room grimly determined to complete the writing exercises we had been set. A few months later, I was surprised to receive an email from Dave: Hi Karen, how’s it all going? It was great meeting you in Yorkshire. I’m going down to the house in France next week and was hoping to do some writing there. I was wondering if you would like to come? We could do some writing and give each other a bit of moral support. Interested? Let me know, All best, Dave. :) By coincidence, I was going be in Paris that week for a perfume launch. And I did really want to see Dave’s house which had sounded idyllic (and possibly full of pilots). So I typed back: I’m in Paris for work anyway that week. Could take the TGV down on Friday afternoon. Would love to see your house. Best, Karen. The reply came back immediately: 25

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Great. Let me know what time your TGV gets in (Poitiers is the nearest station) and I’ll pick you up. Best, Dave. PS: Does this mean you are now flying short haul? I was thrown by his cryptic sign-off. Flying short haul? It sounded like secret code for something naughty. And then, slowly, the embarrassing truth dawned. I typed back: Dear Dave, I am not flying short haul – or long haul. Sadly, I am stationary in London, writing about the comeback of the bob. I think you might be mixing me up with another Karen, the blonde BA stewardess! Best, Karen W. How embarrassing to have responded so eagerly to an offer that was not intended for me but the flamboyant blonde lesbian from BA. I heard nothing for a few days and then a sheepish reply: Hi Karen, Oops!! Yes, the email was intended for the other Karen. But why don’t you come down anyway? Bring your laptop and maybe we can do some writing. I have also got another (prize-winning) writer friend staying. Maybe he can give us some advice. Look forward to seeing you, Dave. I know I should have been too embarrassed to accept. But he had invited me that first night in Yorkshire, I was going to be in France and I did want to see his house. Shamelessly, I looked 26

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up the train timetable on the Internet and typed back the time of my TGV’s arrival. I came out of Poitiers station to find a town in the full bloom of summer – rosy golden light bouncing off the surrounding buildings and every available surface, people hugging and kissing, the cries of ‘Ça va?’ or ‘Comment vas-tu?’ and the sounds of car boots and doors slamming shut. Everything was full of the promise of the weekend to come. But, in truth, I was a little nervous. I was about to spend forty-eight hours with a semi-stranger. It was three months since the course and I was worried I might not even recognise Dave. Fortunately, he was waiting for me outside the station. ‘Hi Karen, so how’s it going?’ he asked, taking my bag and leading me to his car. He looked very suntanned and attractive. ‘What were you doing in Paris?’ I told him about the perfume launch I had been attending as we left the town behind and drove into the French countryside. I looked out of the open window at a vivid yellow and blue landscape, at the fields bursting with sunflowers and blond haystacks against the vibrant turquoise evening sky. As I felt the warm evening breeze on my arm, resting on an open window, and watched the long-armed irrigators send arcs of water soaring over the fields, I felt a surge of excitement for the first time in ages. ‘Bloody hell, that sounds glamorous!’ said Dave, turning to me with a smile. ‘I can’t wait to see your house,’ I said. ‘Did you say you had a friend staying with you?’ ‘Yeah, that’s right, Gerard Wilton. He recently won a major literary award.’ The name rang no bells. 27

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‘What kind of stuff does he write?’ ‘Well, he likes historical stuff and is very interested in aviation.’ ‘So where is… er, Gerard?’ I imagined an old buffer in a navy blazer poring over books of historical facts and aviation history. ‘I left him in the garden with a jug of sangria.’ Forty-five minutes later and we were all sitting in Dave’s garden drinking sangria with a view of his neighbours’ allotments sloping down towards the old chateau of Villiers. Now in ruins, it still looked impressive against the blue July sky. Gerard (or Gerry as he preferred to be called) was not an old buffer in grey flannel but a cool dude in combat trousers with long blond hair. He looked like he was on day release from a rock band or surf school. He was also very charming and modest – particularly since it transpired that he had won a major literary prize. He had become a writer, he said, because he wasn’t good at anything else and, apart from casual work in bars, he had never really had a proper job. But rather than talk about himself or his novels, he seemed very interested in my job – although some of his questions struck me as a little deep for a first meeting. ‘So would you say you were happy?’ he asked me suddenly. ‘Well, who wouldn’t be?’ I said. ‘Sitting in a garden in France on a warm summer evening with a view of a medieval chateau?’ Gerry looked thoughtful. ‘He seems really nice. How do you two know each other?’ I asked Dave when Gerry went back into the house to make another jug of sangria. Dave looked suddenly embarrassed and evaded the question. 28

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‘So, what do you think of the house then?’ he asked. ‘It’s fantastic. I’m very jealous,’ I replied. I asked him how he’d found it and why he’d chosen this village. Dave launched into a story about how he had checked weather charts and motorway maps and websites of house prices in France and had decided that this was the best area in terms of affordability, location and weather. ‘So you didn’t just stick a pin in a map then?’ I said. ‘I looked at dozens of villages and loads of houses,’ he replied, ‘before I found this. It’s by far the best village in the region.’ ‘What about your wife? Does she come out a lot?’ ‘Not really. Linda runs a beauty salon and is always busy. And she’s not really that keen on France anyway.’ This struck me as a little odd – that Dave should choose to buy a house and spend large amounts of time alone in a country that his wife was not very keen on – but he seemed happy enough with the situation, so who was I to question his marital arrangements? An hour later and we were all sitting in the garden of the local crêperie, with Amy Winehouse’s ‘Rehab’ playing in the background, drinking sweet white wine – the only kind of wine Dave liked, it transpired. It was nearly 10.00 p.m. but still warm. As the scent of jasmine drifted over from the stone flowerbed, I couldn’t believe my luck to have landed here – albeit by default. This is the life, I thought. ‘So Dave told me about the mix up with the email,’ said Gerry, as our starters arrived. ‘Yeah, bloody hell!’ said Dave. ‘How weird was that?’ ‘Very. It was so nice of you to invite me anyway, even if the email wasn’t meant for me!’ ‘Yes it was,’ said Gerry, suddenly. 29

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‘What do you mean?’ ‘That email was meant to go to you. Some things are just meant to be.’ It was an attractive idea and Gerry followed it up with another: ‘Shall we get a bottle of Bordeaux? I can’t drink any more of this wine – it’s far too sweet,’ he said, wrinkling his nose and reaching for the wine list. ‘I’m really glad things worked out the way they did,’ said Dave, leaning back with a benevolent smile. ‘Talking to you, I’ve realised that we’ve got a lot in common.’ I couldn’t really see that we had that much in common. His job was to liaise between the creative people at his agency who came up with the ads and the ‘tosser’ clients; I wrote about handbags and wrinkle prevention. But then Gerry and Dave didn’t seem to have that much in common either. Dave had worked his way up through the ranks of a big advertising agency; apart from writing, Gerry, by his own admission, had never had a full-time job. I could not see how their paths had crossed. ‘So how do you both know each other?’ I asked, again. There was an awkward pause. ‘A-ha,’ said Gerry. ‘That’s a story for another day.’ After the short stroll back to the house, Dave suggested a digestif – pronouncing it ‘digestive’, as in the biscuit – and the three of us sat in the candlelit salon until the early hours while he talked about how he hated his job, his plans to turn his barn into a writing retreat and how great it would be to live in France full-time. Later that night, I lay in one of Dave’s guest bedrooms, cocooned in floral wallpaper – even the ceiling and door were papered in it – with Gerry asleep in the room next door. And, for the first time in ages, I fell asleep easily and did not wake until morning. 30

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It was well after 10.00 a.m. before Dave or Gerry stirred. I read for a while and then walked up the cobblestone street to the bakery and bought croissants and a loaf of bread. Just walking across the square – already busy with people heading to the market with straw shopping baskets or pull-along trolleys – seemed more exciting than anything I had done in London for years. When I got back, Gerry was up and making coffee in the kitchen. Wearing wire-rimmed glasses, unshaven and with his long blond hair falling in his eyes, he looked sort of vulnerable and even more attractive. ‘What a star you are!’ he said, as I put the croissants on the table. ‘Is Dave up yet?’ I asked. ‘No,’ said Gerry. ‘He’s still snoring away up there. I’ll go and give him a shout.’ Dave finally emerged – looking very much like a man who’d drunk two bottles of sweet white wine the night before – and the three of us had breakfast at the long wooden table in the kitchen. After jolting himself awake with viscous black coffee, Dave suggested going to the market. Gerry, disappointingly, wanted to work, so we left him with his laptop and walked up to the square in the sunshine. The fashion possibilities in Villiers, I noted, were limited. Arranged around the square were a hunting shop (useful should the military look ever come back into fashion), a funeral parlour, a florist (specialising in funeral arrangements) and two women’s clothes shops, both selling an eye-poppingly awful selection of clothes in sludgy colours. Polyester partout. At least my credit cards could take a well-earned break if I lived here. But the small town also boasted two beauty salons, two pharmacies, two boulangeries, two cafes and a wine shop 31

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– all clues to the villagers’ priorities. The market, which was housed in a modern concrete hall in the centre of the square, was much smaller than I expected. There was one fishmonger, one long table laden with fruit and veg and one cheerful, round-faced teenager selling goats cheese. I was expecting piles of glistening purple-black olives, mouth-watering displays of plump saucissons, oozing French cheeses and other delicious delicacies, but, if I’m being honest, the market seemed to have far less to offer than the organic section of my local M&S. However, bivalve-lovers were extremely well catered for with no less than three different oyster sellers. One of them, I noted from his van, came from the Île de Ré. Dave must have sensed my disappointment. ‘The Thursday morning fair is much better. It spreads right across the town,’ he said. ‘But the fishmonger is excellent.’ It was true. The fishmonger, a man with compelling blue eyes and a big nose, had a great deal to offer, with more varieties of sea-life and crustacea than I had ever seen before. ‘So is Gerry with someone?’ I asked Dave, as he examined a large pink salmon. He shook his head. ‘He and his girlfriend split up over a year ago. It was all a bit messy.’ ‘Oh, really?’ ‘Yeah. He’s actually a very complicated person.’ ‘Oh. I thought he seemed pretty straightforward.’ ‘Trust me,’ said Dave, as if reading my thoughts. ‘You wouldn’t want to get into a relationship with him.’ We were interrupted by a cry of ‘Ah, Dav-eed, comment vastu?’ and an elderly woman grasped Dave’s face and planted numerous kisses on it. As the only Anglais in the village, Dave, I soon realised, enjoyed something close to celebrity status. 32

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Several people (male and female) greeted him ecstatically, flinging their arms in the air with delight when they saw him. Dave spoke only patchy French and clearly could not understand what they were saying but he nodded and smiled a lot and invited at least two of them around for a drink. ‘Possibili-tay. Vous [pointing at the other person]. Aperi-teef [here he would mime lifting a glass to his mouth]. Shezz mwah,’ he would say, pointing in the direction of his house. This was invariably met by a delighted nodding of heads. Our progress around the small market was slow, since when he wasn’t being greeted like a homecoming hero by the locals, Dave liked to examine everything very closely. Eventually, he bought the large pink salmon and suggested that we go to the cafe on the square for a coffee. As we sat in the sunshine outside the Café du Commerce, drinking black espressos, he was accosted again, this time by a thin, wiry man with a big, bushy moustache. ‘Ah Daveed! Ça va?’ ‘This is Victor, the estate agent who found me the house,’ said Dave, inviting him by expansive hand movements to sit down and join us. Victor did so without a moment’s hesitation. He lit a cigarette and asked Dave who I was. Dave didn’t understand, so I answered on his behalf. ‘I’m a friend of Dave’s. I’m here for the weekend,’ I said. ‘So what do you think of his house?’ asked Victor. ‘It’s fantastic. I’m very jealous. I’d love to have a house in France.’ ‘You’d like a house in France? Really?’ Victor suddenly became very animated. ‘Because I have one, also in the centre of the village. It has only just become available. It is very rare for a house to come up for sale in the centre of the village.’ 33

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‘Blimey, your French is good,’ said Dave. ‘What’s he saying?’ I translated. Dave looked very interested. He turned to Victor: ‘Possi-bili-tay… regard-ay?’ Nearly all of Dave’s attempts to speak French, I realised, began with the word ‘possi-bili-tay’. ‘But of course,’ Victor replied. ‘When?’ ‘Possi-bili-tay main-tenant?’ asked Dave. ‘Bien sûr,’ said Victor. ‘Bloody hell,’ said Dave, as Victor went off to get the keys from the agency. ‘There’s another coincidence for you. You said you were thinking of buying a house in France and here’s one that’s just dropped into your lap.’ The three of us walked over to Rue St Benoit, a narrow, cobbled street just off the main square. The house, a two-up, two-down with a garage attached, was shuttered up and uninviting. It had an ugly grey exterior and the shutters were painted sludgy brown, rather than the pale blue-grey of the textbook style français. The front door, made from etched yellow glass and wrought iron, was also a long way from anyone’s idea of the charming French house. But, even before Victor opened the front door, I knew that I was looking at my future. Victor opened the door and we stepped into a narrow stone passageway. To the left was le petit salon. Victor switched on the light to reveal a dour-looking square room that looked like it hadn’t been touched in decades. The walls were papered in a dense brown floral pattern, while all other available surfaces – doors, dado rail, skirting boards and window frames – were painted mid-tone brown. Below the dado rail, the wallpaper had peeled away to reveal damp and crumbling plaster underneath. The house smelled old. (In beauty world parlance, you would say that it had ‘top notes of wet paper and floor polish and a base of damp, mossy earth’.) It felt like a woman neglected 34

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and abandoned – a thing of faded beauty, the paint peeling like cracked make-up on an old face. Her personality was sombre and inward looking, while the fireplace, once the heart of this little house, was boarded up and empty and had not been lit for a long time. Despite this, I could see that the house had once been very pretty and had the potential to be so again. So I ignored the peeling wallpaper and crumbling plaster, focusing instead on the beautiful old narrow floorboards and original features such as the glass panelled doors. I had a strong sense that something sad had happened here. The house had not been shown any love for a long time. And yet it was far from depressing. As I watched Victor struggling to open the shutters and let in light and air, I experienced a huge wave of optimism. ‘Christ, look at this,’ I could hear Dave saying in the room beyond the salon. I followed him into a room that was visibly falling apart, with an ugly mass of pipes, tanks and strange tubular appendages on the wall. There was an antique oil boiler with the front panel hanging off, and a sink unit sagging towards the floor. This was covered in ancient linoleum that curled up at the corners like stale bread. The pale green wallpaper was hanging off the wall in large strips. ‘Who lived here before?’ I asked, as Victor followed us into the kitchen. ‘A very old lady,’ he replied. ‘In her eighties. She was renting it until she moved into an old people’s home.’ I wondered how on earth an eighty-year-old woman had managed to live here. The boiler didn’t work, the kitchen was unusable and there was no indoor loo. But then I noticed what Dave was looking at, and suddenly all the faults paled into insignificance. Beyond the kitchen there was an enclosed 35

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courtyard, with high stone walls, a stone flowerbed full of weeds and a shed in one corner with a tiled roof that housed the outdoor loo. I did not need to see any more. I had already made up my mind. ‘You see. It’s completely private,’ said Victor. ‘You can run around naked here if you want.’ ‘Fantastic!’ said Dave with an enthusiasm that scared me – though not as much as his next sentence. ‘I’m wondering if I should buy it myself,’ he said. ‘Just look at that courtyard. And you’ve got a garage, which is really unusual for the centre of the village.’ ‘But Dave, you’ve already got a house,’ I said. ‘Yeah, I know. Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ve already got enough on my hands. But this would be a brilliant project for you.’ Victor led the way up the narrow staircase (dark brown with an ox-blood-coloured ceiling) that led from the kitchen to a small landing on the first floor. The large main bedroom was decorated (you’ve guessed it) entirely in brown: brown carpet, brown skirting boards and walls covered in what looked like brown parcel paper. I lifted up the edge of the brown carpet – releasing decades of dust as I did so – to find near-perfect wooden floorboards underneath. ‘They’re in good nick, the floorboards,’ said Dave, bending over to pull up another corner. ‘You’d just have to rip up all this crappy carpet.’ We followed Victor into the rear bedroom, which looked out onto the church spire and a sweep of green and golden countryside. ‘Bloody hell,’ said Dave, as I readjusted my vision. The spare room, in contrast to the relentless brownness of the rest of the house, was papered in vibrant, hot pink 1970s swirls. It was hard to imagine anyone getting any sleep in there. 36

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But the psychedelic swirls offered a glimpse of a happier, more vibrant personality. The house hadn’t always been this sad and downtrodden. ‘That wallpaper will have to go,’ said Dave. ‘I quite like it,’ I said. Ironically, the wallpaper, like the jumpsuit and the kaftan, had been out of fashion for so long that it had come back in again. My friends in London, I thought to myself, would pay a fortune for wallpaper like this. Reluctantly, I tore myself away from the hot pink flowers and followed Dave and Victor up a rickety staircase to an enormous attic. It had stone walls, wooden beams and two windows with a fantastic view over the village and surrounding fields. Dave gasped. ‘Just think what you could do with this. You’ve got another three bedrooms here, if you wanted.’ I imagined the grey stone walls painted white, the grey beams sanded back and tinted chestnut brown and the attic converted into an enormous study. ‘So the house costs how much?’ I asked Victor. He handed me a piece of paper with the details: €49,000. I thought I had misread it at first, but no, that really was the price. ‘Christ,’ said Dave, looking over my shoulder. ‘Where in the UK can you find a house for thirty-five thousand pounds?’ ‘The price might seem a little high,’ said Victor, misinterpreting the look of amazement on my face. ‘But I am certain I can get the owners to reduce it.’ ‘Possi-bili-tay doon reduction?’ asked Dave. Victor nodded. ‘Pas de problème.’ ‘Bloody hell,’ said Dave. ‘You’ve lucked out there. I’d jump at it if I were you.’ I didn’t need to be convinced. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to borrow the money, but it was one of the easiest decisions I have ever made. ‘Yes,’ I said, turning to Victor. ‘I want it.’ We 37

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agreed that I would return that afternoon with my passport, so that he could prepare the preliminary documents. And as we walked back up to the square in the hot sunshine, I even thought of a name for it. For some reason ‘coquelicot’ sprang to mind. It sounded like ‘coquette’, had a nice ring to it and suggested bright colour. And so, even though there were only weeds growing in the stone flowerbed for the moment, I named the house Maison Coquelicot – or ‘house of the wild poppy’.

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Hanging up my High Heels for a New Life in France

Tout Sweet

‘an hilarious account of a fashion guru who swaps Prada for paintbrushes and Pineau in rural France’ MAIL ON SUNDAY Travel

Tout Sweet

Hanging up my High Heels for a New Life in France